Alcott Students Win International Botball® Tournament
When the starting lights flash, robots jolt to life and zip across game tables with only one mission: to perfectly execute their pre-written programming in an attempt to be called Botball® Champions.
Who made these miraculous little autonomous robots, you may wonder. And the answer may surprise you; in fact, these robots are products of long, hard hours of work put in by middle school and high school students from around the world.
As it turns out, the robots built by the student team from Alcott Middle School in Norman, Oklahoma took top honors at the 2009 International Botball® Tournament in Leesburg, VA, which took place July 1 – 5.
The win is a great accomplishment in itself. However it is perfected upon by one very important fact: this is the first time, in the history of Botball®, that a middle school team has ever won first place overall at the International Botball® Tournament.
Proving that age has little to do with ability in our technologically savvy world, Daniel Goree, Ben Parker, and Jeffery Terry, all age 14, astounded even themselves with their win.
“I could not believe I was actually seeing us pull that off,” said Goree, the team’s President.
The team’s strategy was fairly simple: focus on the quickest and easiest way to score the most points, all while blocking their opponent from operating its program.
The robot that the Alcott team used for double elimination rounds featured a number of arms, each with a specific purpose, Goree explained. One arm was meant to block the opposing team’s robot, another to sort “fossil fuels” (or orange poms) and “green fuels” (or green poms), and yet another, the one that continually earned the team points, was meant to assist “hydroelectric power” (or blue foam balls) over the PVC pipe border and into their starting box for 10 points per ball.
Botball® teams endure a rigorous spring semester preparing for regional competitions. Then they spend another couple of months making adjustments to their robots’ strategy, design, and programming, all of which is created from scratch by the students.
Each summer KISS Institute for Practical Robotics hosts the Global Conference on Educational Robotics, which includes the International Botball® Tournament. This is where the students come to put their months of hard work to the ultimate test, as they head up against other student teams from as far away as Hawaii, Poland, and Qatar.
“Seeing the robots actually work is one of the best feelings in the world,” Goree said.
Roger Hooker, the Alcott team adviser was enthusiastic about the students’ accomplishment, despite not being able to attend the International Botball® Tournament.
“It’s surprising to me,” Hooker said about how brilliant and enthusiastic the kids are.
Hooker, who has been teaching sixth, seventh, and eighth grade computer classes at Alcott Middle School for only one year, said that before getting involved with Botball® at Alcott, he had no previous experience with robotics.
“They’ve taught me a little bit of programming,” Hooker said of the students, and “they’ve actually taught me more than I’ve shown them.”
As an adviser, Hooker said he gives his time, goes to the opening season workshop, and helps set up fundraisers where the team sells suckers. He also said he wants to promote the Botball® program to girls, and to continue encouraging the students to “think outside the box.”
Laurie Goree (mother of Daniel Goree)
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